Parking for the Pious

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"What, did you want us to make him WALK in?"

I have lived near Our Lady of Blackrock Church for a few years now, and throughout that time I’ve been noticing a trend that has aggravated me more and more with each passing week.  There is alternate-side parking on the street on which I live.  It changes over on Thursday at 6:00, and the law is evidently suspended altogether on Sunday morning, during evenings when bingo is being played, and any other time that large numbers of motorists might be attending church.

Now, I’m not an enormously popular guy – and I’ll probably be less so amongst churchgoing folks if they read this post – so I don’t exactly have a caravan of friends and family making camp in front of my apartment day after day.  Nonetheless, my best friend and my brother have each gotten tickets for parking on the wrong side of my street or failing to switch sides at the required time.  The parking enforcement officers weren’t exactly slow to react, either.  Each time someone I know has been ticketed, it’s been as if an officer was lying in wait for someone to mess up.

Yet if I walk down the street on a Sunday morning I find that dozens of motorists flaunt the law on a regular basis, and not one of them has ever had a ticket on his car’s windshield.  It’s simply not possible that the city has routinely failed to notice the multitudes of infractions.  They are deliberately avoiding enforcement of the law at times when it is commonplace for a certain segment of the public to break it.  I don’t know who is responsible for that decision or why they’ve made it, but I know that it is contrary to the spirit and the very purpose of the law.

If laws are selectively enforced they are not laws at all; they are the whims of the people charged with the duty to maintain an orderly society.  If the city feels that alternate-side parking is an excessive burden to my neighborhood in light of how much parking it needs during certain hours, then they should tear down the signs and repeal the rule, or at least modify both to include hours of exemption.  Why should the burden of responsibility be placed upon visitors to my neighborhood, but not upon visitors to its church?

I can imagine what the justifications might be for the current policy of selective ticketing.  Some might think I’m being mean-spirited and asking that congregants be punished for attending church.  But this has nothing to do with religion.  I’m against all double-standards, especially when it’s a matter of the police or other representatives of government permitting the law to be broken with impunity.

Let’s be clear:  They have no idea whether the cars they aren’t ticketing belong to people who are actually attending church.  This unofficial immunity isn’t offered to a specific sort of lawbreaker, but to people who break the law at specific times.  Considering that some of those times are when bingo is scheduled, it can’t even be argued that this non-enforcement is broadly aimed at protecting the pious.  And even if every would-be ticket recipient was fervently praying in the pews and arranging community service projects in the sanctuary at the time they broke the law, the fact remains that they broke the law.

If it’s a sense of piety that motivates law enforcement to grant such amnesty, I wonder if it would provide the same allowances if the building was not a Catholic church but a mosque, or a synagogue, or a Hindu temple.  For that matter, if the law can be suspended around sacred spaces, are the police free to decide for themselves what a sacred space is, or what kind of behavior puts a person above the law?  Can they patrol the area around Ralph Wilson Stadium and give out tickets only to the cars with out of state plates?

If police discretion is acceptable in one circumstance, it’s acceptable in general.  But any bias in enforcement makes the law unintelligible and unfair.  If the law doesn’t justify an equivalent sacrifice from everyone, it isn’t a good law.  If a cop doesn’t hold every citizen to the same standard, he’s not a good cop.

Poverty in Politics - Either Used or Forgotten

I originally wrote this piece to be posted elsewhere, so the comments and events it refers to are a week or so old now. I still thought it worthwhile to post it here.

I think it’s honest of me to identify myself as coming solidly from the left with all of my political writing. But I certainly don’t make a conscious effort to fit myself into a particular camp, so even while I acknowledge my liberal tendencies, I won’t hesitate to begin an editorial with my own criticisms of fellow liberals or the Democratic Party. One party obviously contradicts my ideals more often than the other, but I have no love for political parties in general. And there is plenty of common ground on which I think both Democrats and Republicans routinely fail to serve the country’s interests.

It’s cheap politics for the DNC to utilize Mitt Romney’s remark that he’s “not concerned about the very poor” and to make a campaign ad out of it. In that ad, the quotation is very conspicuously cut off, and anyone who views such things objectively ought to immediately recognize that it both mischaracterizes Romney’s remarks and allows the Democratic Party to dodge the need to present a clear distinction between their policies and his. Taken out of context, Mitt Romney’s comment sure does portray him as callously out of touch. And indeed, I believe he is just that. But he didn’t say what he’s being accused of saying.

What Mitt Romney really said was, “I’m not concerned about the very poor; we have a safety net there, and if it needs repair, I’ll fix it.” That’s quite different from simply declaring that you don’t care one bit about a particular segment of the population. Romney’s not saying that society has no responsibility for the poor; he’s saying that we already do enough for them. I don’t think one needs to twist that argument in order to criticize it. It would be cartoonishly villainous for a presidential candidate to say, “I don’t care if the poor starve to death,” but it’s not exactly saintly to say, “as long as the poor don’t starve to death, I’m satisfied.” It worries me that the Democratic Party feels the need to mischaracterize Romney’s remarks so they sound like the former statement, because that implies that they don’t see the latter as being sufficiently divergent from their more liberal views.

It says something about the alienation of liberalism in modern American society that commentators like Rush Limbaugh unabashedly deride Romney for defending the very existence of the social safety net while Democrats merely pretend that he doesn’t defend it and make that the focus of their criticism. If liberalism were genuinely at home in American politics, somebody would be quoting Romney’s words exactly as he said them and using them to express indignation at the idea that the poor are sufficiently taken care of. Not only is no prominent politician or commentator saying that in this case, no one ever says it.

After his misleadingly shocking sound bite, Romney went on to say, “We will hear from the Democrat Party: ‘the plight of the poor.’” But will we? Honestly, I can’t think of any Democrat who has reliably expressed lofty ideals about ending the epidemic of homelessness or providing assistance to the poor that goes beyond food stamps and unemployment insurance and that attacks the actual system that keeps people poor, by providing public works employment, for instance.

“You can choose where to focus,” Romney said, ostensibly differentiating his campaign from that of Democrats and other Republicans. “You can focus on the rich – that’s not my focus. You can focus on the very poor – that’s not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans.” I don’t believe him when he says that his focus isn’t on the rich, but that aside, I find that everyone in politics today pronounces their focus to be entirely on the middle class. And that’s easy to understand, since not many votes are found on either extreme of the income scale. In fact, given how broad and flexible different people’s conceptions are of “middle-income,” that’s where all of the votes are. Frequently, Americans, whether sitting comfortably within the top five percent of income earners or walking the poverty line like a tightrope, view themselves as middle class. So when a politician talks about defending middle class Americans or putting his political focus on their interests, citizens will tend to think that he’s talking about them. And there’s little doubt that politicians know this.

President Obama’s comments at the National Prayer Breakfast regarding the Christian obligation to help the poor were striking precisely because they are so anomalous in mainstream politics. The sentiment seemed earnest and was well-placed at the event, but the fact that the DNC ad was released on the same day compels me to view it with a great deal of cynicism. The ad is a transparent attempt to score points by leaping on an easy way of portraying the Democratic Party, fairly or unfairly, as having more compassion for the poor than their opponents. I can only hope that the prayer breakfast speech was genuine, and not a more subtle example of the same – a quick response to Romney’s ostensible gaffe the day before.

If it was intended as a response, that illustrates the very problem with political treatments of the issue of poverty and economic disparity. The best that the Democratic Party can do most of the time is wait for a Republican to say something objectionable, and then issue a response that says, “We’re not like that; we care about everybody.” I’d be far more convinced if they took the lead, if they actually demonstrated their commitment to solving society’s ills from the bottom up, rather than from the middle out. As it is, the commitment to helping the poor is only something that is claimed, and rarely something that decides policy.

The DNC ad was framed entirely as part of a negative campaign. It cites nothing that Democrats have done or plan to do in order to eradicate poverty, homelessness, or hunger. It points out the initiatives that Romney would likely undertake that would hurt the poor, and it is right to do so, but a preponderance of negative campaigns risks miring us in negative government, wherein the avoidance of harm is considered a good unto itself. I trust the Democratic Party to avoid willingly making life worse for the nation’s poorest citizens, but I do not trust them to undertake truly original initiatives to mend what is broken within American society.

So long as I have reason to believe that the choice in American politics is between the party that doesn’t care about the poor and the party that cares about them only enough to make themselves look good, I won’t be much inclined to take empty pronouncements on the topic seriously, not matter which side they come from.

Fasting is Good for You

I think I’m about ready to make a practice of fasting again. I did it regularly while I was in high school and college, but now it’s been about six years since I’ve done anything so spiritual or disciplined. First of all, I lost the better part of my faith, so the motivation for it largely evaporated. Then, even when I thought to try my hand at it again to see if it would help me rediscover what I’d experienced before, for two and a half years I was living and sharing all of my meals with another person, which makes it awfully difficult to eschew food without risking offense. Other times, I’ve been so short of money that refusing to eat when I could seemed like it would be an undue risk, especially when I needed my strength in order to perform physical labor. The issue of daily energy remained even when I had enough money to feed myself without fail. And throughout all of that, there’s simply been the struggle to return by sheer force of will to practices the benefit of which I can no longer clearly see.

I don’t know about you, but when I break down my own failings and the extent of wasted time like that, it really makes me want to kill myself. On the other hand, if I overcome it all and start fasting again, that might help me cope with the stress. I have all these excuses for why I haven’t done something that made a younger self feel exceptionally centered and in touch with the world, but that just indicates that I’ve been looking for a breaking point. Back when I fasted, denying myself food wasn’t particularly difficult, but explaining what I was doing was. I found that a lot of people became genuinely concerned and chastised me when I said I wasn’t eating. “It’s not healthy!” they’d cry.

Well, if that has remained as a barrier to my resuming the practice, it is being lifted. I have had the good fortune to stumble across some recent articles that prove what I suspected every time somebody begged that I stop fasting because of their intuition that it was bad for me: they were full of shit. In fact, scientists widely recognize that drastic dietary reductions actually extend the lifespans of animals. New research also indicates that short term caloric restriction, and protein deprivation more specifically, can improve organ function, perhaps by triggering cellular responses that improve the body’s ability to handle various stresses.

Perhaps even more impressive, a crash diet of 600 calories per day for two months has proved itself able to actually cure type-2 diabetes by prompting the body to remove fat from the pancreas, allowing insulin production to restart. After I first read about that research, I had occasion to speak to a representative of a diabetes treatment organization at a health fair. I asked him about this information and found that he hadn’t heard of it, couldn’t understand what I was saying about it, and seemed ready to disregard it out of hand. Considering that he was supposed to be an expert on the disease, I think his ignorance of the new data speaks to just how deep runs the presumption of the harmful effects of deprivation.

But based on what I’ve been reading, the positive effects of fasting are not even remotely limited to the spiritual or emotional. Health considerations actually should add incentive for self-denial, no matter how counter-intuitive that may seem to some. I hope it’s to my good fortune, then, that I can no longer hide behind the conflict between the interests of body and spirit when I continue to put of returning to spiritual practice. The only barrier that I can legitimately say remains is the damaged state of my personal faith.

Religion and Liberalism

Jacques Berlinerblau, writing recently for the Washington Post, provided a list of topics worth watching by those interested in the interplay of religion and politics. While it is an insightful list and the author’s knowledge of religious trends can’t be disputed, his first item seems to rely on a misunderstanding of activism coming from the political left. Berlinerblau anticipates what I believe is a very unlikely scenario – the union of Occupy movements with progressive people of faith. He writes:

“Ever since the rise of the religious right… observers have been wondering when (or if) the religious left would ever re-mobilize as a political force to be reckoned with.”

That parenthetical is important. I think that the question is indeed if it will, and that the answer is no. Religious institutions and religious people will not find a welcome place in liberalism, at least not without a major breaking point. It’s not as though there is any fundamental incompatibility between liberalism and religious belief, but virulently anti-religious atheists do comprise an extremely vocal minority of the liberal wing of American politics. Their input makes the landscape of liberalism very inhospitable to religion.

As a person who tends toward liberal thinking but also holds a degree in religious studies, I find this to be one of the more unfortunate elements of the modern liberal movement. I’ve heard liberal commentators flatly state that there’s no God, as if they had personally taken a complete tour of the cosmos and found it empty of a spiritual realm. Self-aggrandizing atheists tend to hold themselves up as being exceptionally resistant to the self-delusion of religionists, while failing to acknowledge that such a cock-sure rejection of so much as the remote possibility of the existence of a god is dogmatic in equal measure as religious belief.

And such brusquely dismissive attitudes also strike me as markedly illiberal, especially in light of the often annoying tendency of liberal movements to show no discretion in what voices it invites to contribute to its aggregate monologue. Berlinerblau for some reason entertains the possibility that the heirs to the Occupy Wall Street movement might allow “the progressive faith communities that eventually joined its ranks [to] come to play a pivotal role in [their] leadership or activism.” But why would a group that is actively shunned by a portion of the liberal movement come to have a managerial influence when no other has ever done so? Religious institutions are the last things I would expect to give direction to the movement, and I don’t expect anything whatsoever to do that.

Yet Berlinerblau continues his remarks by saying : “Were they to do so, fairly obvious synergies would develop around issues such as poverty, corporate greed, the environment, and health care, to name but a few.”

I have no doubt that that would happen, in theory. But synergies, no matter how obvious, are quite alien to liberal activist movements. They are characterized instead by a series of disjoint voices jostling together, generally being permitted their own agendas. Religion alone would tend to face a unique uphill battle as an exception to that trend, so if it aspires to a pivotal role, it will have enough difficulty contributing its own voice, let alone attempting to synthesize with those of other groups.

Glenn Beck, Israel, and Mormon Eschatology

[I wrote the following article for a new website dedicated to Jewish news. Due to editorial disagreement, the piece appears at http://www.thetribevibe.net/ in a redacted form. I remain committed to the missing pieces, so I thought it worthwhile to post the original version to my personal blog, as well. In the interest of seeing that I am not competing with my own client, I would like to point out that this piece is merely an expansion to an article written for and first published at . And I ask that anyone who is interested in Jewish affairs visit that site for more such news in the future.]

In August, the controversial conservative commentator Glenn Beck embarked on a highly-publicized tour of Israel, which he had dubbed “Restoring Courage.” Before the event even concluded it elicited a wide range of responses from Israeli and world media, Jews of different political stripes, and followers and opponents of Beck within the United States. Much of the media in Israel gave only light coverage to Beck’s visit because most people outside of the U.S. simply don’t have reason to recognize or attach significance to his views or activities.

The evident purpose of Beck’s rally was to encourage an international movement to resist criticism and pressure being leveled against Israel by the United Nations, the European Union, human rights groups, and others. Because of his staunch support of Israel in context of the perception of overwhelming opposition, Beck was warmly welcomed by some prominent Israelis, even having addressed the Knesset on July 11th in an event organized by the Likud party’s Danny Danon. Commentary from the Jewish community suggests that some people are eager to support any non-Jewish voice that firmly sides with the state of Israel.

On the other hand, many have been wary of his personal intentions and the possibility of a Christian doctrinal interest in Israeli affairs. Heshy Rossenwasser, editor of the conservative Arutz Sheva news service effectively summarized both perspectives in an op-ed the week before the Restoring Courage rally:

“Any voice in the wilderness sounding a note of support to us comes as a breath of fresh air, and we welcome it with such ardor that we are willing to overlook potential faults and pitfalls – namely, that his seemingly pure and good-hearted motives just barely conceal political agendas and religious ideologies that ought to give Jews much pause.”

Beck’s opponents in America, both Jewish and non-Jewish, take issue with his seeming messianic mission and a strong tendency to intertwine his Mormon faith with his politics and social views. His stated support of Israel may well be in earnest, but there is a serious question of motivation at hand. Christian Zionism has a long history, grounded in evangelical and other conservative Christian beliefs regarding the end times and the second coming of Christ. The associated Christian prophecies range from vague frameworks of assumption about what is to come, to bizarrely specific accounts, but generally reflect the idea that the full restoration of the state of Israel must occur before the Christian prophecy of the second coming can be fulfilled. It is not clear whether Glenn Beck’s personal view reflects this idea, or how thoroughly formulated his beliefs about it are.

It’s also not clear what his views are regarding Judaism and the Jewish people in general. While he is presently being embraced by some members of the Jewish community for his vocal outrage against poor treatment of Israel in the world community, he has formerly come under fire from groups within the United States for ignorant language and commentary that evokes persistent notions of a Jewish conspiracy. In February of this year, Beck was quickly compelled to apologize for remarks that he made on his radio show comparing Reform Judaism to “radicalized Islam” and saying that they were akin to each other by virtue of both being politically-oriented.

Taking his distaste for social justice-oriented Jews farther while speaking on his show more recently, which now broadcasts online, Beck dismissed the housing protests that began in July in Israel, identifying the participants as far-left radicals, and drawing connections between them, communist ideology, and Islamists. The conspiratorial bent evoked by these kinds of statements is familiar in Glenn Beck’s broadcasts. Another fine example that is relevant to his unclear relationship with Judaism comes from January, when he was still employed by Fox News, at which time he claimed that a group called “the intelligent minority” had been conspiring to control people through propaganda for the past century. Eight of the nine people whom he implicated as prominent members of this minority were Jewish.

If Glenn Beck is the friend to Jews and to Israel that he claims to be, such discomforting beliefs and statements as these must be no more than coincidence and purely secular politics. If, however, they belie his fondness for the Jewish people, then his Restoring Courage tour and further advocacy for Israel must hide an ulterior motive. Beck’s devout Mormonism should be able to tell us something about his possible eschatological views. On the one hand, Mormon prophecy says that Zion, the new Jerusalem, will rise in North America, and thus one might suppose that there would be no explicit role for Israel to play in their end times scenario. However, Mormonism holds that the new covenant with Jesus does not supersede the covenant with Abraham, and that the Jews remain G-d’s chosen people, though destined to ultimately accept Jesus. This notion of eventual universal acceptance of the Mormon faith underlies Mormon belief in the baptism of the dead, which put the Church at odds with Judaism when it was revealed that they were baptizing holocaust victims.

There is a passage in the Mormon scripture called the Doctrines and Covenants, which says, “Let them, therefore, who are among the Gentiles flee unto Zion. And let them who be of Judah flee unto Jerusalem.” In addition, Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, stated in a talk in 1843 that Judah must return and Jerusalem be rebuilt along with its walls and Temple before the second coming of Jesus can occur. Thus, it is common Mormon belief that Israel will have a significant role to play in the fulfillment of Mormon prophecies, which must be preceded by the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy through the restoration of the Temple. Though religious interpretations are always certain to vary, these statements, together with the expectation that Jews will convert before the end times, suggest that some Mormons may advocate for the expansion of Israel on the same view as certain evangelicals, believing that the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy through the restoration of the Temple on the Mount is necessary to the fulfillment of their own prophecies of a second coming.

If Glenn Beck has such an idea in mind, it could give added meaning to his seeming embrace, in a broadcast immediately preceding his rally, of the Temple Institute, which is run by Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, who ran for the Knesset in the eighties as a member of the far right-wing Kach party, and “has argued that Jewish law does not allow Christians or Muslims to live in the land of Israel.” Without knowing more about Beck’s personal views regarding eschatology, it is mere speculation, but if he is interested in seeing gentiles flee to his own homeland in the United States, while Jews gather in an Israel with Biblical borders, then it makes good sense that he would align himself with Israelis who share a similar vision of racial exclusionism. No doubt his critics would see this as in keeping with his broader worldview, as well. Glenn Beck has a well-established history of drawing stark lines, whether between conservatives and liberals, communists and capitalists, believers and unbelievers, or Christendom and Islam.

If Glenn Beck is indeed engaged in a campaign in defense of Israel for reasons quite distinct from his personal feeling towards Jews and Judaism, it is little more than an alliance of convenience. And if one thinks that that is a far-fetched scenario, it is worth remembering that that is exactly the alliance being entered into by those Jews and Israelis who have embraced Glenn Beck on account of his presenting himself as a courageous, non-Jewish defender of Israel, despite their either not knowing who he is and what he stands for, or disagreeing with him outright on his various other controversial opinions.